
After more than two decades in enterprise software, Yugabyte CMO Ajay Khanna still prefers the unfinished job: build the team, sharpen the category, and make complicated technology useful before the market has settled on its vocabulary.

He helped name Cassandra, watched Facebook outrun his early growth estimate, and then spent a decade turning those lessons into YugabyteDB. Now Karthik Ranganathan is asking the same old question in a new arena: what happens when the infrastructure must remember, scale and stay awake?

Kannan Muthukkaruppan is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Yugabyte, the company behind YugabyteDB — a PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL database built for cloud-native applications at global scale. A gold medalist from IIT Madras and UC Berkeley alumnus, Kannan spent 13 years at Oracle (PL/SQL compiler) and Facebook (scaling HBase for billions of users) before co-founding Yugabyte in 2016. Under his technical leadership, Yugabyte raised $298M in funding, achieved unicorn status at a $1.3B valuation, and built one of the most respected open-source distributed databases in the industry.